Wine and the Dollar: Big Mac Index Update

August 2, 2022 By Mike Veseth in exchange rates, wine, wine markets 3 Comments

The Economist newspaper’s most recent analysis of global exchange rates was released a few days ago and the results are noteworthy, especially for those of us in the wine trade where exchange rates are an important factor in both import-export flows and in the cost of imported bottles, corks, equipment, etc.

No News is News?

Exchange rates are in constant motion — most currency values change at least a bit — and sometimes quite a lot more! — on a daily basis. It is a fact of life in international trade and finance. But sometimes there is a strong secular movement that shakes things in a big way and the recent sustained rise in the U.S. dollar’s value is a good case in point.

There are dozens of forces that can shift exchange rates — I used to joke that the worst job in the world was the person who had to write the “exchange rate” headline for the Wall Street Journal every day because he or she had to boil down dozens of factors into a few words. I remember one headline that read “Dollar Rises on No News.”

There is plenty of news right now to explain the dollar’s appreciation relative to most of the world’s currencies and the most important explanation are rising U.S. interest rates that the Federal Reserve has implemented and is expected to continue this year. Rising interest rates attract short term investment funds from abroad. The dollar strengthens as the investment funds pour in until the point (to simplify quite a lot — experts please forgive me!) where the dollar is so expensive that the risk that it will reverse course and fall exceeds the interest rate premium that it earns.

Econ 101 Impacts

That’s what is happening now and the Econ 101 impact is that the strong dollar makes imports relatively cheaper for buyers in the U.S. but makes U.S. exports more expensive for foreign buyers. Imported wine will be cheaper because the currencies used to buy them are cheaper in dollar terms. U.S. wine exports will face a headwind because the strong dollar raises their cost to foreign-currency buyers.

A strong dollar is not, therefore, particular good news for U.S. wine businesses that compete with imports or have export aspirations. It is, however, potentially good news for U.S. importers of foreign wine and the owners of U.S. brands that rely upon bulk wine imports to fill their bottles, boxes, and cans. This bit of good news has been tempered recently, however, by international trade logistics issues that make imports more costly and delivery less reliable. The dollar’s value is just one factor in the complex web of wine trade.

The interest rate effect diverts the dollar from what is called the purchasing power parity (PPP) level, which is the exchange rate where the currency’s buying power is the same inside the U.S. as it is on the international markets. A currency that is at or close to its PPP level does of itself distort trade. If you have travelled abroad and thought the prices there were a lot cheaper (or more expensive) than back home, you have encountered a PPP distortion.

Big Mac Index Update

The Economist calls its Big Mac Index a “lighthearted” attempt to estimate the PPP level of exchange rates in order to see which are over-valued and under-valued using the ubiquitous fast-food hamburger’s price in local currencies as the foundation of analysis. It seemed like a silly idea when first revealed back in 1986, but the Big Mac Index has proved to be fairly accurate overall in its assessments. More often than not, major currencies have tended to converge over time towards their Big Mac PPP exchange rate.

So take a close look at the table at the top of this page (click on the image to enlarge it). The U.S. dollar is so strong that there are only a small number of major currencies — Switzerland in particular — that are over-valued relative to it. Most other currencies, including the Australian dollar, Argentine peso, and Chilean peso — are undervalued, which means their wine exports have an exchange-rate based competitive advantage in the U.S. market.

The euro is undervalued as well, but by much less than I might have guessed given that its value has tumbled toward dollar-euro parity in recent weeks.

The Economist has also released an updated Big Mac index shown here, which is adjusted for differences in per capita GDP. The idea, in simple terms, is that many prices (especially for non-traded goods and services) will be higher in countries with higher income levels, so PPP settings need to take this into account.

Argentina and Hemingway

This adjustment is significant for some countries, as the table above shows. The Argentina peso, for example, is now calculated to be very much over-valued, not under-valued, and I think this is probably accurate. A Financial Times article published last week reports that peso’s black-market rate, which had been steady recently at about 200 pesos per dollar (compared with the official rate of about 130 pesos), has suddenly plunged toward 350 pesos. Such a shift is often a sign of a developing currency crisis. Will the peso do a “Hemingway” — first decline slowly and then suddenly collapse? Stay tuned.

The currencies of Australia and Chile along with South Africa are still under-valued after the GDP adjustment, but the euro is shown to be over-valued, suggesting that, further depreciation is possible.

The U.S. is experiencing historically high inflation just now, which by itself would argue for a PPP-driven decline in the dollar’s value. But other major currency countries are having the same problem. And, in any case, rising U.S. interest rates, for as long as they last, will likely keep the dollar strong in the medium term.

The Bottom Line?

The bottom line? These are tricky times for exchange rates, with inflation pulling one way and interest rates the other. The dollar could continue to strengthen or, as expert Barry Eichengreen argued in a recent Financial Times, column, reverse course and fall.

Wine businesses that are sensitive to exchange rate changes need to be cautious indeed. You cannot control the exchange rate, but there are ways to hedge against unfavorable shifts using either forward exchange markets (you lock an exchange rate today for a set transaction in the future) or foreign exchange options (giving you the option to make a purchase or sale at a fixed future price).

Hedging is important if a business has significant costs or revenues in a foreign currency. Recent earnings reports suggest that some large and sophisticated businesses have not fully hedged their positions, however, with the result of unexpected earnings (or costs) due solely to exchange rate adjustments on otherwise stable transaction.

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What is a “Hemingway?” I have coined this term to characterize a particular pattern of decline. One of the characters in Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises is asked how he lost his fortune. Slowly and then suddenly, he replies.

Wine, Stagflation, and the Strong Dollar Syndrome

May 24, 2022 By Mike Veseth in Economic impact, exchange rates, wine, wine markets Leave a comment

The U.S. dollar has surged in value on foreign exchange markets in the last year and especially the last few weeks, as this graph of the dollar versus the euro makes clear. It once took about $1.30 to purchase a euro, but some analysts believe that USD-EUR parity — a dollar per euro — is on the cards for later this year.

The story differs country-by-country, but the overall trend is clear. Just as in the 1980s, when the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy to fight inflation, the dollar has soared on foreign exchange markets. Exchange rate movements are not generally either good or bad, they create winners and losers like any other change in price. But a sustained spike in the U.S. dollar can be a global problem. The strong dollar of the early 1980s created a global crisis that came to an end through the Plaza Accord, an international agreement to re-align exchange rates.

I don’t think the strong dollar syndrome will go away soon because, as I explain below, it is very useful to U.S. policymakers just now. It is too soon to know how this strong dollar episode will end, but not too soon to think about the implications in light of the 1980s experience, with special emphasis on the wine industry. Herewith three factors to consider.

Trade, the Dollar, and Wine

The conventional wisdom is that a strong currency encourages a country to import and discourages exports because each dollar (in this case) buys more foreign currency, and it takes more euro (for example) to buy a dollar. So it would seem like the super-strong dollar, by encouraging imports and discouraging exports, would be counter-productive if you are interested in jump-starting growth. But there are other factors to consider (see next point below) and these are unusual circumstances.

International trade is all fouled up with logistics costs and bottlenecks, for one thing, and the pattern of trade in many commodities is distorted by covid closures in China and commodity trading shifts due to the Russia-Ukraine war. In other words, a strong dollar may have less impact on trade today than in other situations.

This is true in the wine trade as well. The strong dollar may push wine import prices down, but logistics issues and the impact of some protectionism policies pushes in the other direct. The exchange rate still matters a lot in the international wine trade, but other factors are more important right now. The dollar’s impact will be felt, however, if the strong dollar can be sustained (as it was in the 1980s).

Inflation, the Dollar, and Wine

The reason why the strong dollar is suddenly a stealth national economic policy is inflation. By making imports cheaper, a strong dollar puts a limit on the ability of domestic firms to raise prices. It is harder to raise the price for generic California wine if the price of imports is stable or declining. This is one factor (not the only one) that has kept U.S. wine prices from rising along with the overall inflation rate.

The strong dollar also makes imported production inputs cheaper for U.S. firms, a significant advantage in the global product chain.

For the Federal Reserve, a strong dollar means that they can be less aggressive in their domestic contractionary policies designed to squeeze inflation out of the economy. The dollar, by putting a limit on price increases through foreign competition, will do some of the dirty work for them.

Unintended Consequences

But not everyone will be happy with this situation. Our trading partners will be justified in their belief that the U.S. is exporting some of its inflation to them though higher prices for imports from the U.S. and other commodities that are priced in dollars rather than local currency. Their domestic firms will find it easier rather than harder to raise prices with the cost of imports rising, too.

There are also international debt issues to consider since many countries borrow (and must repay) in dollars. An increase in the dollar’s value can have more impact on debt servicing costs than a rise in interest rates, for example.

As a result of these unintended consequences there is now talk of a sort of inverted currency war. Usually currencies wars take the form of competitive devaluations, as everyone tries to have the cheapest currency to encourage exports.

Now, however, several factors but especially inflation is causing policy-makers to re-think this strategy and consider a sort of arms race to increase currency values. The instability that results from such a situation can be serious and lead to conflict, which is what produced the Plaza Accord in 1985.

And in the Long Run …

So the direct effects of the strong dollar syndrome are worth your consideration, but the indirect effects — the inflation lid, the international currency war, a potential debt crisis, etc. — are perhaps even more important.

In the long run, however, the impact on the U.S. wine industry is likely to be more severe both through the direct effects on input and domestic labor cost factors and through the classic Econ 101 impacts once the logistics issues have time to settle out.

But there is one more long term factor to take into account. As the Plaza Accord demonstrated, a very strong dollar is not sustainable from a global financial standpoint. When the market turns it is likely to be sudden. A soft landing can change abruptly. Buckle up.

Global Wine Trade: Headwinds, Obstacles, Distortions

July 27, 2021 By Mike Veseth in Economic impact, exchange rates, globalization, wine, wine markets 1 Comment

Wine has become one of the world’s most globalized consumer goods. The OIV estimates that 45% of all wine crosses at least one international border on its way from producer to consumer. And that’s just the finished product. If we examine the whole product chain, to include bottles, corks, and so forth, wine’s globalization index would be even higher.

So it is significant that wine today faces headwinds, obstacles, and distortions that make global wine a risky business. Taken together, these forces impact every part of the wine trade.

Headwinds

The covid pandemic has created new headwinds and magnified some existing ones that make global wine trade more difficult and uncertain. On-premise sales are critically important to some segments of the wine industry, for example, and the recovery from lockdowns is slow, uneven, and uncertain. Bars and restaurants have struggled to refill to capacity in many cases, even where rules permit this, because of both uneven response by wary consumers and difficulty attracting and retaining service sector workers.

Many wineries invested time and effort into establishing alternative paths to market during the pandemic and now they must wonder whether direct-to-consumer and other strategies will continue to be as critical to success and what aspects of these efforts should be expanded in the future. There are a lot of puzzle pieces to put together as we move into the new normal and the picture that they create won’t be the same as it was pre-covid.

Obstacles

Wine globalization has been powered by favorable trade policies and efficient transportation logistics over the last 50 years, so it is significant that obstacles have appeared in both areas. US tariffs, Chinese tariffs, Brexit uncertainty — the list of trade policy factors that create barriers to particular wine flows is much longer than in the past and some counties (Australia, I’m looking at you) have been hit particularly hard.

But an even bigger obstacle for wineries not directly affected by trade policy has been the breakdown of ocean shipping logistics, which moves bulk wine, packaged wine, and intermediate goods such as bottles and corks. A world-wide shortage of shipping containers is to blame and big increases in the costs of shipping a container is one result. Port congestion, which adds extra days or even weeks and much uncertainty to shipping schedules, is an unwelcome side effect.

Distortions

Finally, foreign exchange rates have introduced or magnified distortions in the relative prices of wine on international markets. The graph above shows how the US dollar (USD) has fallen relative to the Euro in the pandemic period. The dollar has recovered a bit of its value recently, but it is hard to know if this rise can be sustained. In general, a falling currency encourages exports and discourages imports. The impact on US wine exports has been muted, however, by the several factors noted above including especially demand-squelching pandemic lockdowns in target markets.

The dollar’s fall came as a bit of a surprise, as I noted in a column about a year ago. Now there is another surprise. The Economist newspaper reports that the dollar is still over-valued by over 10 percent against the Euro!

The Economist released its most recent Big Mac Index report last week, which uses international fast food hamburger price differences to estimate the relative purchasing power of various currencies. This might sound like a foolish exercise, but the Big Mac Index has a pretty good track record as a general indicator of over- or under-valued currencies.

The June 2021 Big Mac Index finds only four currencies over-valued relative to the USD, so the currency distortion would favor US wine export sales. Significantly, Sweden (+9.6%) and Norway (+11.5%) are in this group and they are both importanr potential export markets for US wine.

The list of currencies that are under-valued compared to the USD is long and includes a number of significant wine producing countries that gain an advantage from the exchange rate mis-alignment.

Euro area -11.1%
Australia -15.2%
New Zealand -15.7%
Argentina -30.2%
Chile -30.3%
China -38.3%
Moldova -48.8%
Romania -55.5%
South Africa -59.6%

Several of these countries are important wine exporters and so their under-valued currencies give them a cost advantage in competition for US sales. Global wine has always been a tough business. The current combination of these headwinds, obstacles, and distortions make the global wine trade particularly challenging as we head into the fall.

Wine 2021: The Good News is the Bad News Could Be Much Worse

January 12, 2021 By Mike Veseth in Australian wine, economic crisis, Economic impact, exchange rates, wine, wine markets 5 Comments

Australia’s export dilemma.

As the door to 2021 slowly swings open, the landscape looks both familiar and transformed at the same time. When the U.S. wine industry entered 2020, for example, the problems seemed to be stagnant demand on one side and excess wine grape supply on the other. Not a good situation for the world’s largest wine market, but not something beyond our ability manage, either.

Those problems are still with us, although they’re a bit lost in the fog. Structural wine production capacity is still too large, but this is disguised a bit by a smaller 2020 harvest in California and widespread smoke damage, which took some grapes off the market.

Overall wine demand is still under-performing, too, but that is hard to gauge exactly because of the way that wine channels have been disrupted by the covid pandemic in general and bar/restaurant restrictions in particular. Consumers are buying much more through retail channels, a good deal more direct-to-consumer and much less in the on-trade. Whatever the net impact, which seems to be negative, the effects on individual wineries in particular sales channels is significant.

The Unified Sine & Grape Symposium‘s “State of the Industry” session is about two weeks away so those of us on the panel are working to put our thoughts about 2021 in order. Here are some of my working notes. The theme here is that, while there is plenty of bad news going into 2021, if you take an international perspective on the U.S. situation, it quickly becomes clear that things could be much worse. If that sounds like a “glass half full” perspective, well it is.

Take the loss of on-premise sales. These lost sales are costly indeed, but producers in Europe had it much worse because they depend much more on bar and restaurant sales. No wonder their industries are hurting to badly and that crisis distillation is back in some E.U. countries.

Unlucky Australia

If people in the U.S. wine industry are looking for something to be thankful for, they might consider how lucky they are not to be Australia. The U.S. industry has been caught in the trade war crossfire to be sure. Importers and distributors have been hit by U.S. tariffs on many European wines, for example, and China has imposed tariffs on the relatively small amount of U.S. wine sold there.

As if matters weren’t bad enough, the U.S. recently imposed 25% tariffs on French and German still wines above 14% abv, which had been spared in earlier rounds of the trade wars. U.S. firms that import, distribute, or sell these wines are collateral damage in the bigger trade fight, which has nothing to do with wine. These are daunting challenges, to be sure, but nothing in comparison to what Australia is experiencing.

The Australian wine industry invested heavily in opening the door to the Chinese market and moving up-market once inside. And they were remarkably successful. As you can see above in data from Wine Australia, China was by far Australia’s largest export market by revenue in 2019, accounting for $1.3 billion of the $2.9 billion of wine exports. China bought almost three times as much as the #2 export market, the United States.

Australian wine is #1 in China, too, measured by value. Australia overtook France in the Chinese sales league table in 2019.

This was good news for Australian producers back with economic relations with China were happy ones, but now a variety of tensions exist and China was imposed up to 212% tariffs on Australian wine. I don’t know if sales will go to zero immediately, but that is a lot of tariff to absorb. Although anti-dumping measures are cited in this case, the real conflict is elsewhere. Economist have long held that anti-dumping tariffs, ostensibly designed to deal with damage from predatory pricing, are often subject to political abuse.

Australian producers hope to be able to divert previously China-bound production to other Asian markets and some of it may end up in the U.S. and U.K., too. But realistically there is just too much wine for these markets to absorb and margins in the pivot markets are unlikely to match those in China.

But things could be even worse. What if Australia was even more dependent on Chinese market? The turn of the political screw would be even more painful then. And that is what happened in the past to Moldova and to Georgia when their biggest wine export market, Russia, decided to use wine as political tool.

The Good News is That the Dollar is in the Dumpster

You can find another good news story by looking at the foreign exchange markets. Typically when there is any kind of crisis around the world there is a rush to the security (and liquidity) of the U.S. dollar. Uncertainty drives the dollar in turbulent times. Or at least that’s what we thought.

A strong dollar translates into cheaper imports, which would not have helped in any way restore domestic balance in the U.S. wine market. A strong dollar isn’t the worst thing for domestic producers, but the negatives outweigh the positives for many firms.

As I noted in a Wine Economist column back in August, this crisis is different and the dollar didn’t soar, it plunged as this graph (above), which shows the dollar versus the euro, indicates. And then, after bouncing around for a while, it plunged again.

Now this is bad news for consumers who want to buy imported wine because a cheap dollar buys less on international markets, so European wines, many already subject to U.S. tariffs, are even more expensive. But it is good news for U.S. wine producers who compete against euro-priced imports. The cheap dollar gives them a cost advantage in the domestic market. There is also a theoretical advantage in export markets, but honestly those markets are pretty congested right now with lots of unsold wine (some of it from Australia) looking for a home.

But foreign exchange news isn’t completely sunny for U.S. wine because the dollar isn’t falling against all currencies. As this graph shows, the Argentina peso is even weaker, so the U.S. dollar steadily increased in relative terms, making wine from Argentina a fierce competitor where price is the key factor, especially bulk wine trade.

Economics is often called the dismal science and these examples of good news have a decidedly glass-half-empty feel. Stay tuned for glass-half-full analysis in coming weeks.

What Next? Wine Industry Mid-Year Report & Preliminary Brexit Analysis

July 12, 2016 By Mike Veseth in economic crisis, Economic impact, exchange rates, Supply and Demand, wine, wine distibution, wine markets 1 Comment

“What next? was the question I asked to open my report at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium‘s “State of the Industry” session in January. Risk and uncertainty were my forecast for 2016.

Bernie, Donald, Zika, Brexit. Look out! Anything can happen, I told the audience, although I ended with a Frank Sinatra theme. It could be a “Very Good Year” if we can dodge the many potential hazards.

I wasn’t the only one who was worried. Four speakers in a session on wine industry investment were asked about their expectations for 2016. All four said that the prospects for the U.S. wine industry were bright … unless something happened to the economy.

Cautious Optimism?

We are halfway through the year and the cautious optimism expressed earlier seems justified. The U.S. remains one of the few large economies to be growing, for example, and unemployment rates are low. The June jobs report offered evidence of further recovery. But confidence in economic growth seems very fragile and the Federal Reserve has hesitated repeatedly to raise key interest rates.

One worrisome indicator is the yield curve, which tracks the difference between short- and long-term interest rates. The yield curve has become unusually flat recently, a pattern that is sometimes associated with economic slowdowns. A recent Deutsche Bank analysis of the yield curve forecasts a 60% chance of a recession in the U.S. in the next 12 months. Yikes!

Interest rates around the world are so low (and sometimes even negative) that policy makers are worried. What if something goes wrong? How can we push interest rates even lower? Would it make any difference if we did? With fiscal policy handcuffed by political chaos in many countries and monetary policy seemingly out of ammunition, there is concern that a crisis in one country could easily spread to others.

What next? That’s still the right question, both in general and when it comes to wine. While the U.S. wine market continues to grow and attract the attention of international competitors, the Nielsen figures reported in the July 2016 issue of Wine Business Monthly suggest caution. Off-premise wine sales increased by a rate of just 1.1 percent overall in the four weeks ending April 23, 2016, indicating a possible deceleration of earlier more healthy growth.

Brexit’s Many Potential Impacts

The list of potential challenges and threats is very long but the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union (a.k.a. Brexit) is at the top of most lists. What does Brexit mean to the wine business? The answer is that it is too soon to be sure, but here is a quick guide to what to look out for and the impact on wine.

The biggest impacts of Brexit to far have been political, with the heads of the Conservative Party and the nationalist UKIP group both resigning (for very different reasons) and Labour’s leader under sharp attack from his own members. Since British tax policy has been a significant burden on wine sales there in recent years, the uncertainty about the who will lead and where she (Theresa May will take over as Prime Minister in the next day or so) will want to go is significant for wine.

The partial political vacuum in England has seemingly increased the influence of Scotland’s talented leader Nicola Sturgeon, who suggests that Scotland might once again consider leaving the U.K. (a Scexit?) in order to remain closely linked to the E.U. Sturgeon has taken strong anti-alcohol positions, which could affect wine policy, although this is way down the list of things to worry about if Scotland breaks away and the U.K. breaks apart.

Financial markets react to news more quickly than the “real” economy and the rise of the U.S. dollar and fall of the British Pound are the most visible effects so far. The Pound has tumbled dramatically as the graph above show and some observers believe that it will continue its descent although this is far from certain. newfx

Short Run: Exchange Rate Effects

The falling Pound is important because, as this table of U.S. exports for the first quarter of 2016 from Wine by Numbers indicates, the U.K. has become a more important market for U.S. wine exports in recent years. The U.K. is second to Canada in U.S. bottled wine exports and first in the bulk wine market.

The falling Pound makes imports from the U.S. and other wine nations more expensive in the U.K. U.K. consumers are notoriously price sensitive, so the falling Pound could produce substantial wine demand impacts, especially if there is a U.K. recession, as many expect, due to falling investment (see below).

brexit

The exchange rate effect will hurt U.S. exports to the U.K., but the biggest impacts will be on other countries that rely upon the British market to a greater extent than we do. Australia, South Africa and of course European wine producers will take a bigger hit.

The problem is compounded by the fact that supermarkets are a critical sales vector in the U.K. and much of the food they sell is imported and will therefore be more costly to source. Supermarket margins are likely to be squeezed as they attempt to pass on higher costs to consumers with uncertain economic prospects.

Don’t be surprised if this puts pressure on foreign wine suppliers to cut their wholesale prices to British supermarket buyers and thus absorb some of the exchange rate impact. That is an incentive to develop alternative markets … such as the U.S. The margin wars are just getting started.

So the wine news is not very good in the U.K., where wine prices are likely to rise, incomes could fall, wine taxes may also increase, margins come under attack, and prohibitionist forces may be strengthened. Bad news for the British who drink wine and bad news for others including U.S. producers who want to sell it to them.

Long Run: The Vultures Circle

But the biggest impacts are likely to be the long-term structural changes that will be required if and when Britain or England or whoever is left leaves the European Union and the single market. The U.K. is an important wine center both because of the large British domestic market and also because of its essentially unrestricted access to European markets and resources. It is too soon to know how this will change for wine, but it is instructive to watch other sectors to get a sense of the dynamic.

There is already concern about disinvestment in British steel and automobile manufacturing, for example, if resources are shifted into other E.U. zones. Much of British auto production is exported and would be disadvantaged if the U.K. loses its open access to E.U. markets. Voters in Sunderland may eventually rue their strong Brexit support if Nissan moves production (and some of the current 7000 factory jobs) away from its big plant there to new homes in the E.U. heartland.

And everyone in The City, London’s big financial center, is openly concerned, too. London residents voted overwhelmingly to remain in the E.U. in part because of their desire to protect The City’s economic standing (and their jobs), which would diminish if movements of capital and skilled workers to and from the continent were restricted.

Any major disruption in The City will have widespread impacts on wine, especially the on-premise trade but not limited to that. The vultures (in the form of European cities hungry for those high-paying finance jobs) have already started circling.

I am still cautiously optimistic for the U.S. wine economy and for Britain, too, but there are lots of risks to consider. That question — What Next? — still applies.

How Much Has the Strong Dollar Affected U.S. Wine Exports?

February 9, 2016 By Mike Veseth in Economic impact, exchange rates, wine, wine exports 3 Comments

Last week I wrote about the strong U.S. dollar and its impact on U.S. wine imports. My conclusion was that there was an exchange rate effect, but it was less than you might otherwise expect because of specific factors that are at work in the sparkling, bulk, and bottle wine import markets today.

This week we turn to U.S. wine exports. Econ 101 tells us that a strong currency discourages exports by increasing their cost to foreign buyers and this is an important factor. Thus, for example, we would expect U.S. wine exports to Canada to have fallen over the last year.

Loonie Times

The U.S. dollar has appreciated dramatically against Canadian dollar (or “Loonie,” as they call it) over the past two years. After coming close to parity in 2014 the Canadian dollar nose-dived and it now takes in the neighborhood of C$1.45 to purchase one U.S. dollar.

After weathering the global financial crisis better than most countries, Canada has fallen victim to its dependence on natural resource exports, especially oil exports. As the price of oil has fallen the foreign exchange value of the Canadian dollar has plunged, which raises the cost of imports for Canadian buyers. They are feeling the pain.

How bad is it? The New York Times reported that the combination of drought in California, which raised agricultural goods prices, and the falling Loonie has resulted in soaring imported fruit and vegetable prices. How high? Eight dollars for a head of cauliflower! Yikes!

Canada is largest single market for U.S. bottled wine exports so you would expect this situation to depress wine sales to Canada and to have a similar but perhaps smaller effect in other countries where the exchange rate shift has not been as extreme. Has it happened? Let’s look at the data.

U.S Wine Exports by the Numbers

Here are wine export data for the first three quarters of 2015 as as provided by Wine by Numbers, a publication of the Unioni Italiani Vini (click on the chart to enlarge). These data show that U.S. wine exports actually increased in the time period covered here rather than decreasing as theory predicts. The story varies from country to country (as it did with imports), but the overall trend is to higher exports — exactly opposite of the textbook prediction. What gives?

A first answer is that perhaps it takes more time than has passed so far for the higher exchange rate value to pass through to higher import prices, higher wholesale prices, higher retail prices and then for the quantity effects (lower depletions, lower reorders etc) to funnel back. International finance theory has a whole chapter on how these lags can create distortions. There is something to this lag theory, but I think there is more going on.

A second factor, especially on higher value bottled wines, is branding strategy. Rather than raise price and lose market share, it is possible that some big players are absorbing lower margins to keep on the shelves and in the game abroad. How long can they do this? Some Argentinean wineries have been doing it for three or four years so far here in the U.S. It’s expensive, but could be worthwhile if things turnaround before too long.

A third factor, which applies especially to the bulk wine market, is that U.S. tanks are full of these wines with no indication that domestic consumer demand for them will pick up soon. Better to sell them off abroad as bulk exports than dump them out when they are too old and tired to find buyers.

A final piece of the puzzle is the duty drawback program, which I wrote about last year. This is a very peculiar U.S. government program that under some circumstances will refund import duties for a winery if it exports a similar U.S. wine abroad. Sometimes this makes it seem like exports subsidize imports and, as now, it might be true that imports provide rebated duty funds that can subsidize exports. To be honest, I am not really sure of the net effect except to say that there is an incentive for large integrated wine companies to balance imports and exports.

As we saw last week, while bulk wine imports have not surged due to the exchange rate effects, they have remained significant. This fact means that, for certain companies (especially larger wineries) importing and exporting the right wines to and from the right places, duty drawbacks can be significant.

General Conclusions

Looking back over these two columns, the first conclusion is that so far in this cycle the pure foreign exchange effects have largely been offset by specific forces in different sectors of the wine business and in different countries. Exchange rates matter, but they are just one of many forces at work. Since those forces are likely to be different in the future, it is important to be cautious in projecting these trends ahead too far.

I used to warn my students against trying to forecast foreign exchange rates. Too many variables. Too many unknowns. Exchange rates are the most difficult thing in economics to predict, I would tell them. But now I know that I was wrong. Wine trade may be more difficult because it is affected by all the forces that hit the exchange rate and a whole lot more.

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I encourage readers to drill down in the data provided here because there are a lot of individual country stories to be examined along with the big picture analysis I have provided here.

How Much Has the Strong Dollar Affected U.S. Wine Imports?

February 2, 2016 By Mike Veseth in Economic impact, exchange rates, wine, wine markets 2 Comments

About this time last year I wrote a column that analyzed how the rise in the U.S. dollar’s international exchange value was likely to impact the wine market. My conclusion was that the simple Econ 101 rule that a stronger currency leads to higher imports and lower exports might not perfectly apply to wine. I cited research from the falling dollar era to support the idea that the impacts would be different in different market segments and for different sets of countries.

So it is a year later now and enough time has passed to begin to see some impacts. What is the story so far? I’ll review the exchange rate effects and focus on imports this week. Next week’s column with analyze U.S. wine exports and try to draw some broader conclusions.

The Strong Dollar Story

The U.S. dollar has increased in value dramatically over the last two years relative to several important currencies, making products from those countries potentially cheaper to U.S. buyers. The euro, for example fell from almost $1.40 to about $1.10 during this period, meaning that a €10 bottle of wine would have moved from $14 to $11 if the exchange rate effect was fully realized.

That is a substantial price shift for a bottled wine. Price changes like this can be especially important in the bulk wine market where margins are sometimes just pennies per liter and small changes can shift competitive advantage from one country to another.

The euro’s fall has a lot to do with monetary policies. The U.S. Federal Reserve is raising interest rates while the European Central Bank has pushed them into negative territory. Other currencies that are important to the wine industry such as Australia, Chile, and South Africa have also fallen but due instead to China’s slowing growth.

When China’s growth began to stumble, it affected natural resource imports from Australia, Chile and other countries, reducing the demand for their currencies and pushing the value down as the next two charts show.

The result is that both the Australian dollar and the Chilean peso are much cheaper making their wine exports relatively cheaper to dollar buyers both in the U.S. and in some other countries. This is one reason why Australian wine exports rose to their highest level since 2007.

Chilean exports and those from New Zealand and South Africa have also benefited from strong dollar/weak local currency effects. How has this affected U.S. imports from these countries?

Imports in the U.S. Market

Here is a snapshot U.S. wine imports for the first three quarters of 2015 as provided by Wine by Numbers, a publication of the Unioni Italiani Vini (click on the chart to enlarge). The numbers suggest that the exchange rate changes have had some effects, but that those impacts are different by market category and country. And they also show that the exchange rate is far from the only thing that affects the wine market.

Take sparkling wine, for example. Overall imports of sparkling wines grew by more than 21 percent by volume and 19 percent by value during this period while average unit prices fell. This pattern has the Econ 101 textbook direction, but the magnitudes are much higher than you would expect if the exchange rate was the only factor. Sure enough there is something else going on — the Prosecco boom that has broadened the whole sparkling wine category. The cheaper euro certainly aided this process, but it wasn’t the whole story by any means.

Now look at bulk wine imports. As I noted before, bulk wines in the past were more sensitive to exchange rate changes than other types of imports, so looking only at the strong dollar you would expect a big increase in bulk imports. But instead we see a dramatic decrease in bulk imports (although this varies by country). Yikes! What’s going on here?

As with sparkling wine there are other factors than the exchange rate at work. U.S. producers have substantial existing inventories of bulk wines and are less interested in imports now, even if prices are attractive. The demand for wines selling for $9 and less has been declining in the U.S. market in the last two years and large harvests in the Central Valley have reduced the need for imports substantially. The strong dollar has probably kept bulk wine imports from falling even more but foreign currencies would have to plunge dramatically to make higher bulk imports attractive.

Bulk versus Bottle

Finally, the market for bottled wine imports shows rising import volumes and falling import expenditures and prices, which is what the textbook analysis would suggest for products with an inelastic demand. The question here is why didn’t imports rise even more? The inventory/depletion/reorder time lags in the wine market are one reason.

But a more important factor is the reality of brand strategy pricing for higher-priced bottled wine products. One lesson of the financial crisis is that once your reduce sticker price it is hard to persuade consumers to pay more again. As a result, I suspect that many import producers are absorbing some of the exchange rate changes in the form of higher margins or spending it on importer and distributor incentives rather than retail price cuts. Some of the growth we see here is from new entrants (and re-entrants) into the market (and there are many of them) who are taking advantage of the exchange rate to launch campaigns in the U.S. market.

So, as you can see, the exchange rate has been a factor, but the picture is complicated. It is even more complicated if you break it down country-by-country. Come back next week for my take on the export side of the equation.

Will Argentina Wine Export Growth Return in 2016?

January 19, 2016 By Mike Veseth in Argentina, economic crisis, exchange rates, wine, wine markets 2 Comments

Last week’s column analyzed the reasons Argentina’s wine boom fizzled out. Wine exports to the U.S market have more or less plateaued since 2010 after a decade of rapid growth. Part of the problem, I wrote, is increased competition in the wine market, particularly from the so-called Red Blends that seem to have taken some of the momentum from Argentinian Malbec.

But the biggest factor has been Argentina’s domestic economic policies, which made it very difficult to do business and squeezed the margins of export industries, including wine. The squeeze has been particularly severe in the value wine categories, where the margins are so tight (or even negative) that Argentinian producers have been squeezed out.

Yes / No / Maybe?

Will Argentina wine growth in the U.S market return in 2016? Maybe is the answer, although 2017 looks like a better bet than 2016. The main reason for optimism is the change in government that took place in December 2015 when Mauricio Macri became President of Argentina, promising an end to the policies that crippled the economy, especially export industries like wine, and pushed inflation skyward.

The Economist magazine reports that Macri is “off to a fast start,” removing export taxes and allowing the peso to fall from its artificially high level. These actions will benefit exporters, but also send a shock to the domestic economy through higher interest rates and a short-term boost in the inflation rate due to rising import costs.

Argentina’s wine industry it likely to be twisted in 2016, with falling domestic economic activity offset by the exchange rate’s boost for exports. Growth in both domestic and export markets will have to wait until 2017 and beyond. Good news under the circumstances even if it is far short of an instant cure for the ailing industry.

Like a Normal Country

But some of my friends in Argentina tell me that they are not expecting a miracle. They just want Argentina to be “like a normal country,” as they put it, in terms of its politics and economics and perhaps that’s what they will get.

If “normalization” works, will Argentina’s wine boom return to the U.S market? Perhaps, but things have changed and adjusting the macroeconomic levers won’t turn back the clock entirely. Argentina will come back, that’s for sure, although it will take a while for the foreign exchange and other factors to be fully felt But don’t expect a return of the boom.

The best that Argentina should hope for — and it is actually a good thing — is to be like a “normal country” when it comes to the U.S. wine market. By this I mean that its exports are driven by the normal factors and not subject to booms or crises. Being a normal country in this context suggests a focus on the $10 and above price points, because that is where market grown and margin opportunities are.

A recent Rabobank report on Argentina’s wine sector notes that the reforms will allow more competitive pricing for Argentine wine exporters, but cautions against a rush into the value wine segment where Argentina used to be strong. “There are now opportunities to be more flexible with pricing,” Rabobank’s Stephen Rannekleiv notes, “but these need to be managed carefully in order to avoid undermining the long-term premium positioning of the brand and the overall category. … Excessive pricing moves may allow for windfall profits today, but could create headaches in the long run.”

And being a normaql country also means resisting the temptation to define Argentina as Malbec-ville. I know the temptation to adopt a particular grape as a region’s “signature variety” is strong, but I don’t see it as the best path for the industry.

Three-Dimensional Argentina

Argentina has Malbec, and that’s a good thing. But before the growth slowed smart Argentinean producers were already trying to add dimensions to their market space. Terroir is an obvious dimension that is even more important in signalling quality and authenticity than it was a few years ago. I think many consumers now look for region — Uco Valley? Salta? — and especially elevation (Malbec develops differently in Argentina depending on the vineyards’ altitude) as quality indicators.

Another way to add dimensions is to exploit grape varieties beyond Malbec. There are so many wines that do well in Argentina besides Malbec and Torrontes, the two “designated” signature grapes. I love Mendel’s old vine Semillion, for example, And we recently surprised a Syrah-loving friend at a local Argentinean restaurant by ordering a higher elevation Syrah from the Uco Valley. He loved it, but would never have thought of ordering an Argentine Syrah. Time to get that thinking started.

The options are nearly endless, as we learned a few years ago when we visited Buenos Aires and had lunch with sommelier Andrés Rosberg (you can read about the lunch here). Andrés knew that we would taste many Malbecs during our visit and he wanted to be sure that we understand that Malbec was only the most visible part of the story — not the whole story and maybe not even the best story.

No Sure Things

So he served us a line-up of wines that featured everything except Malbec and it was great. Lesson learned and it was reinforced as we met with winemakers and tasted distinctive Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and even Bonarda. Malbec? Yes and that’s a good thing. But a lot more, too.

This is an age of discovery for wine and Argentina has much to discover, both within the Malbec terroirs and beyond Malbec. That’s the sort of strategy that “normal countries” are embracing in the U.S. wine market today.

Argentina has little experience as a normal country, making its way without crisis or drama. The success of Macri’s economic policies is not a sure thing since they depend on short-term sacrifice for long-term gains in an uncertain and even unstable global economic environment. It won’t be easy to become normal, but it is an important step.

Sometimes, as Argentina’s national soccer team has demonstrated, great players and great ideas can come to a disappointing end. I am optimistic, however, and hopeful that the wine sector gain will regain momentum while avoiding the boom-bust cycles of the past.

Butterfly Effect: How China’s Crisis Threatens the U.S. Wine Industry

August 26, 2015 By Mike Veseth in economic crisis, Economic impact, exchange rates, wine, wine markets 5 Comments

“The Butterfly Effect” is a term coined by Edward Lorenz that describes the nature of a highly interconnected system such as the global environment or the global economy. A butterfly beats its wings in Brazil, the story goes, setting off a chain reaction that indirectly results in a tornado thousands of miles away in Texas.

The Butterfly Effect was on my mind last month when I spoke at the annual meeting of the California Association of Winegrape Growers in Napa, California. Part of my presentation outlined several indirect global threats to the California and U.S. wine industries. Two of these are in the news this week.

China Market Meltdown and Contagion

The financial crisis in China was one of the threats that I highlighted. “I know what you are thinking,” I told the group, “Mike, we don’t have a lot of money in the Chinese stock market and we don’t really sell too much wine in China, so I don’t see how falling Chinese stock prices are a threat to our business.” Well, they aren’t much of a direct threat, it’s that Butterfly Effect that you need to worry about.

Economists have a name for the Butterfly Effect of a financial crisis — we call it contagion and it takes several forms. Exchange rates are one way that economic effects are transmitted from country to country. The Chinese crisis drives down raw material prices on global markets and this has pushed down the foreign currency values of many natural resource producing countries including Australia, New Zealand and Chile.

These three countries are important wine exporters to the U.S. and lower exchange rates for their currencies means increased competition for U.S. producers. When you find that a Chilean producer has undercut your price for bulk Cabernet Sauvignon, for example, there might be a Butterfly Effect at the root of the problem.

Oil is another potential contagion vector. As China slumps, oil prices do, too. This has a disproportionate impact on certain countries such as Russia, which relies on oil exports to China more than in the past due to the current international sanction regime. When Russia also slumps due to falling oil sales wine producers in Spain, for example, find themselves stuck with excess stocks earmarked for the Russian market. If they try to sell them off here in the U.S. at a bargain price that’s another Butterfly Effect to consider.

The Contagion-Busters

Contagion occurs in other ways and I highlighted the group that I think of as “The Committee to Save the World” (shown above) in my Napa talk (you might prefer to call them the Contagion-Busters). The “Committee’s” job is to stop contagion or at least minimize its effects and it is a difficult task. They have been focused on Greece in recent months, but now it is impossible for them to ignore China.

Hopefully they can prevent the Chinese crisis from having real impacts on other large economies. It is already clear that there have been substantial financial effects (the U.S. stock market “correction,” for example) but the real economy of jobs and output is slower to react and sometimes is less affected. Fingers crossed.

Certainly the Chinese crisis adds risk to the whole world economic system and puts constraints on policy. If the Federal Reserve now goes forward with its widely anticipated plan to raise interest rates in September, for example, the result is likely to be a big spike in the value of the U.S. dollar on foreign exchange markets, putting U.S. wine producers at a further competitive disadvantage. Another beat of the butterfly’s wings?

Keep an eye on China. The impacts could be both bigger and different than you otherwise expect.

Exchange Rate Lessons from Australia’s Wine Boom and Bust

March 24, 2015 By Mike Veseth in Australian wine, book reviews, economic crisis, exchange rates Leave a comment

Kym Anderson (with the assistance of Nanda Aryal), Growth and Cycles in Australia’s Wine Industry: A Statistical Compendium 1843-2013). University of Adelaide Press, 2015. (Available as a free pdf download — follow the link above.)

Kym Anderson’s new book on the five major boom-bust cycles of the Australian wine industry is a landmark wine economics study. Like all of Anderson’s work, it is data-driven and provides both the casual reader and focused student with a wealth of information. A detailed Executive Summary is followed by 73 pages of analysis (and ten more of references), 86 revealing charts and more than 450 pages of tables.

Answers and Questions

I’m not sure I have ever seen such a detailed account of what happened to a wine industry, when, where and how. The data span the decades, regions, grape varieties, international regimes and economic cycles. Such a wealth of information is valuable both for its ability to answer questions and for the way that it provokes them.

I won’t attempt to summarize Anderson’s big volume here (Andrew Jefford did a great job of this in his Decanter column) but I thought I might illustrate the sort of focused analysis that the book makes not just possible but convenient. We are always looking for lessons from history and I think Australia’s wine business cycles are useful in this regard, especially the fifth cycle, which began in 1986 and continues today.

Exchange Rate Effects?

Anderson describes the recent collapse of the Australian wine industry as the result of a “perfect storm of shocks” including drought and rising irrigation water prices, the global financial crisis, the rise of the Australian dollar (driven by mineral exports to China), increased competition from other wine-exporting countries, and China’s austerity policies (which have reduced demand for luxury wine products). He could have added vineyard heat spikes, wildfires and the gradual but significant effects of global climate change to the list of challenges. Perfect storm, indeed!

Since we are currently experiencing a period of major exchange rate realignment, with the U.S. dollar on the rise and the Euro seemingly in free fall, I thought it would be useful to tease out the many ways that the Aussie dollar impacted its wine industry in recent years. According to news reports currency instability was the hot topic at the ProWein wine fair this year, so analysis of the possible effects is timely. Here are some brief points taken from the Executive Summary.

The 1986 boom began, Anderson tells us, as a response to the historically low value of the Australian dollar (hereafter abbreviated AUD), which encouraged exports by reducing their price to foreign buyers. The AUD’s low value was due to falling prices for mineral exports.
Wine exports boomed, rising to 2.3% of all Australian exports by 2004.
Wine prices increased, stimulating vine plantings, higher production and more exports but higher prices also limited domestic wine market growth making Australian producers more dependent on export markets.
Rising exports increased the incentive for investment in developing overseas markets for Australian wine, both through generic marketing and private brand promotion. Meanwhile, other countries also began to expand wine exports, too, contesting key market spaces.
The AUD began to rise in 2001 (driven by Chinese mineral demand). Competition in export markets made it difficult to pass through rising foreign exchange costs to export customers, so much of the burden was passed back in the form of lower AUD export receipts and, in due course, lower wine grape prices.
Meanwhile, the strength of the AUD made imports cheaper, including wine imports, which increased dramatically. Especially affected were Sauvignon Blanc imports from New Zealand and Champagne imports from France.
New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc became the best-selling white wine in Australia. Not the best-selling imported white wine. The best selling-white wine, period!
Wine grape prices collapsed and the value of vineyard land fell, in some cases to the same low value as unimproved farm land. This is the bust that the Australian industry is still recovering from.

Lessons for the U.S. Today?

The exchange rate isn’t the whole story of Australia’s fifth wine cycle by any means, but you can see that it had important effects. The long term instability in the exchange rate translated into booms and busts in wine exports, imports, wine prices, grape prices, land prices and so on.

Anyone who thinks the current rise of the U.S. dollar won’t impact the U.S. wine industry or have global repercussions should take a look at Anderson’s study of Australia. The U.S.story will be different, and the impacts less just because our domestic market is so much larger, but there will be significant impacts.

This is just one of the analytical threads in Kym Anderson’s important new book. I invite you to dig and see what questions his work raises and what lessons you can learn.

The Wine Economist

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